Smart Cities, not only new Research Papers but also exciting forecast!

The debate about SMART CITY is booming, both as an opportunity to drive a more sustainable economic development and an incubator of innovation and transformation that can merge the Virtual World of Mobile Services, Internet of Things and Social Networks with the Physical Infrastructures of Smart Building, Smart Utilities (i.e. electricity, heating, water, waste, transportation, and unified communication&collaboration infrastructure).

William J. Mitchell stated it many years ago “Our cities are fast transforming into artificial ecosystems of interconnected, interdependent intelligent digital organisms”, but now there is a growing agreement about leading advisors like Forrester, McKinsey, Pike Research, ABIResearch and investors, including public ones like the EU SETIS Roadmap (next figure), that the transformation of the metropolitan landscape is driven by the opportunity to embed intelligence into any component of our towns and connect them in real time merging physical world of objects, humans and virtual conversation and transactions.

There are many consulting companies that have dedicated teams on smart cities that are publishing new reports, for example:

· McKinsey has previously stated that “Over the next 15 years, 600 cities will account for more than 60 percent of global GDP growth” and provided a tool “Global Cities of the future” for “Exploring the globe and view data on the dramatic urban growth expected by 2025”, in another research focused on How green are China’s cities?, and in “What Matters online” has identified the “What matters about Cities” as a core topic in which is involving some of the best thinkers from around the world in the discussion.

Smart City revolution is coming to Italy, too. Some early projects were already done in the past, for example European Smart Cities project compared Ancona (51th), Perugia (52th), Trento (45th) and Trieste (49th) with other early smart EU cities, more recently the Rete città intelligenti was promoted by ForumPA with IBM, including smaller towns effort like Monteveglio with Transition Town or those involved in the ZeroCO2 Communities project.

But it was the FP7 European Initiative on Smart Cities that has ignited many local Public administrations, such as Genova, Torino, Bari, Firenze, Milano, Parma, Palermo to launch new initiatives in order to take advantage of the opportunity of funding (10 000 – 12 000 M€ for a total of 40 000 M€ ). Obviously competition is hard since EU will co-finance only 25 large cities (>500 000 inhabitants) and 5 very large cities (>1 000 000 inhabitants) committing to implement the proposed demonstration, testing and deployment programmes in the 3 sectors – buildings, energy networks and transport and to go beyond the 2020 EU climate and energy targets.

There are also many other efforts in place, one of the most forward looking is at the heart of the design of the EXPO 2015 exhibition (6 month since may 1st 2015, 20 million visits planned), inheriting the legacy of EXPO 2010, whose theme “better city better life” was already connected to the development of sustainable smart cities . Digital Smart City Expo 2015 will be built and operated on state of the art technology, in order to propose a model for Smart Cities of the Future, in terms of infrastructure, operations and services to visitors/citizens. It will also “empower visitors to become food-aware citizens, combining groundbreaking technological services with environmental sustainability as a template for our future cities”.

New York times published an interesting article http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/business/ibm-takes-smarter-cities-concept-to-rio-de-janeiro.html about the new Intelligent Operation Center that IBM built for Rio De Janeiro (cost about $14 million). In It there is this extimate: “I.B.M. expects its Smarter Planet unit, which includes the Smarter Cities business, to have revenue of $10 billion by 2015″. In the same article I noticed the link to http://newsroom.cisco.com/songdo that provides a ton of updates about the $35-billion-dollar Songdo project, a model for smart cities around the globe where CISCO is implementing Smart+Connected Communities. Cisco uses “intelligent networking capabilities to weave together people, services, community assets, and information into a single pervasive solution”.

Smart Cities are a global revolution, I recently discovered Cyberjaya, Malesia, a RM1.5 billion investment from government, based on feed-in tariffs to offset set-up cost, that should create 52000 new jobs by 2020, identifies as one of the four smart cities taken as a model by FutureCity project in Japan. For additional information http://www.asli.com.my/DOCUMENTS/8thAXIATA/Pipah.pdf

The announcement of the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Cities in London is a new important opportunity for shaping the future of smart cities leveraging IoT, citizenship, integrated urban service and platform.
For additional information go to: http://blogs.intel.com/research/2012/05/24/icri-sustainable-cities/